The Mysteries of Udolpho
She leaned from the window, and saw him on a knoll of the broken bank,
leaning against the high trees that waved over him, and pursuing the
carriage with his eyes. He waved his hand, and she continued to gaze
till distance confused his figure, and at length another turn of the
road entirely separated him from her sight.
Having stopped to take up Signor Cavigni at a château on the road, the
travellers, of whom Emily was disrespectfully seated with Madame
Montoni’s woman in a second carriage, pursued their way over the plains
of Languedoc. The presence of this servant restrained Emily from
reading Valancourt’s letter, for she did not choose to expose the
emotions it might occasion to the observation of any person. Yet such
was her wish to read this his last communication, that her trembling
hand was every moment on the point of breaking the seal.
At length they reached the village, where they staid only to change
horses, without alighting, and it was not till they stopped to dine,
that Emily had an opportunity of reading the letter. Though she had
never doubted the sincerity of Valancourt’s affection, the fresh
assurances she now received of it revived her spirits; she wept over
his letter in tenderness, laid it by to be referred to when they should
be particularly depressed, and then thought of him with much less
anguish than she had done since they parted. Among some other requests,
which were interesting to her, because expressive of his tenderness,
and because a compliance with them seemed to annihilate for a while the
pain of absence, he entreated she would always think of him at sunset.
“You will then meet me in thought,” said he; “I shall constantly watch
the sunset, and I shall be happy in the belief, that your eyes are
fixed upon the same object with mine, and that our minds are
conversing. You know not, Emily, the comfort I promise myself from
these moments; but I trust you will experience it.”
It is unnecessary to say with what emotion Emily, on this evening,
watched the declining sun, over a long extent of plains, on which she
saw it set without interruption, and sink towards the province which
Valancourt inhabited. After this hour her mind became far more tranquil
and resigned, than it had been since the marriage of Montoni and her
aunt.
During several days the travellers journeyed over the plains of
Languedoc; and then entering Dauphiny, and winding for some time among
the mountains of that romantic province, they quitted their carriages
and began to ascend the Alps. And here such scenes of sublimity opened
upon them as no colours of language must dare to paint! Emily’s mind
was even so much engaged with new and wonderful images, that they
sometimes banished the idea of Valancourt, though they more frequently
revived it. These brought to her recollection the prospects among the
Pyrenees, which they had admired together, and had believed nothing
could excel in grandeur. How often did she wish to express to him the
new emotions which this astonishing scenery awakened, and that he could
partake of them! Sometimes too she endeavoured to anticipate his
remarks, and almost imagined him present. She seemed to have arisen
into another world, and to have left every trifling thought, every
trifling sentiment, in that below; those only of grandeur and sublimity
now dilated her mind, and elevated the affections of her heart.
With what emotions of sublimity, softened by tenderness, did she meet
Valancourt in thought, at the customary hour of sunset, when, wandering
among the Alps, she watched the glorious orb sink amid their summits,
his last tints die away on their snowy points, and a solemn obscurity
steal over the scene! And when the last gleam had faded, she turned her
eyes from the west with somewhat of the melancholy regret that is
experienced after the departure of a beloved friend; while these lonely
feelings were heightened by the spreading gloom, and by the low sounds,
heard only when darkness confines attention, which make the general
stillness more impressive—leaves shook by the air, the last sigh of the
breeze that lingers after sunset, or the murmur of distant streams.
During the first days of this journey among the Alps, the scenery
exhibited a wonderful mixture of solitude and inhabitation, of
cultivation and barrenness. On the edge of tremendous precipices, and
within the hollow of the cliffs, below which the clouds often floated,
were seen villages, spires, and convent towers; while green pastures
and vineyards spread their hues at the feet of perpendicular rocks of
marble, or of granite, whose points, tufted with alpine shrubs, or
exhibiting only massy crags, rose above each other, till they
terminated in the snowtopped mountain, whence the torrent fell, that
thundered along the valley.
The snow was not yet melted on the summit of Mount Cenis, over which
the travellers passed; but Emily, as she looked upon its clear lake and
extended plain, surrounded by broken cliffs, saw, in imagination, the
verdant beauty it would exhibit when the snows should be gone, and the
shepherds, leading up the midsummer flocks from Piedmont, to pasture on
its flowery summit, should add Arcadian figures to Arcadian landscape.
As she descended on the Italian side, the precipices became still more
tremendous, and the prospects still more wild and majestic, over which
the shifting lights threw all the pomp of colouring. Emily delighted to
observe the snowy tops of the mountains under the passing influence of
the day, blushing with morning, glowing with the brightness of noon, or
just tinted with the purple evening. The haunt of man could now only be
discovered by the simple hut of the shepherd and the hunter, or by the
rough pine bridge thrown across the torrent, to assist the latter in
his chase of the chamois over crags where, but for this vestige of man,
it would have been believed only the chamois or the wolf dared to
venture. As Emily gazed upon one of these perilous bridges, with the
cataract foaming beneath it, some images came to her mind, which she
afterwards combined in the following
STORIED SONNET
The weary traveller, who all night long
Has climb’d among the Alps’ tremendous steeps,
Skirting the pathless precipice, where throng
Wild forms of danger; as he onward creeps
If, chance, his anxious eye at distance sees
The mountain-shepherd’s solitary home,
Peeping from forth the moon-illumin’d trees,
What sudden transports to his bosom come!
But, if between some hideous chasm yawn,
Where the cleft pine a doubtful bridge displays,
In dreadful silence, on the brink, forlorn
He stands, and views in the faint rays
Far, far below, the torrent’s rising surge,
And listens to the wild impetuous roar;
Still eyes the depth, still shudders on the verge,
Fears to return, nor dares to venture o’er.
Desperate, at length the tottering plank he tries,
His weak steps slide, he shrieks, he sinks—he dies!
Emily, often as she travelled among the clouds, watched in silent awe
their billowy surges rolling below; sometimes, wholly closing upon the
scene, they appeared like a world of chaos, and, at others, spreading
thinly, they opened and admitted partial catches of the landscape—the
torrent, whose astounding roar had never failed, tumbling down the
rocky chasm, huge cliffs white with snow, or the dark summits of the
pine forests, that stretched mid-way down the mountains. But who may
describe her rapture, when, having passed through a sea of vapour, she
caught a first view of Italy; when, from the ridge of one of those
tremendous precipices that hang upon Mount Cenis and guard the entrance
of that enchanting country, she looked down through the lower clouds,
and, as they floated away, saw the grassy vales of Piedmont at her
feet, and, beyond, the plains of Lombardy extending to the farthest
distance, at which appeared, on the faint horizon, the doubtful towers
of Turin?
The solitary grandeur of the objects that immediately surrounded her,
the mountain-region towering above, the deep precipices that fell
beneath, the waving blackness of the forests of pine and oak, which
skirted their feet, or hung within their recesses, the headlong
torrents that, dashing among their cliffs, sometimes appeared like a
cloud of mist, at others like a sheet of ice—these were features which
received a higher character of sublimity from the reposing beauty of
the Italian landscape below, stretching to the wide horizon, where the
same melting blue tint seemed to unite earth and sky.
Madame Montoni only shuddered as she looked down precipices near whose
edge the chairmen trotted lightly and swiftly, almost, as the chamois
bounded, and from which Emily too recoiled; but with her fears were
mingled such various emotions of delight, such admiration,
astonishment, and awe, as she had never experienced before.
Meanwhile the carriers, having come to a landing-place, stopped to
rest, and the travellers being seated on the point of a cliff, Montoni
and Cavigni renewed a dispute concerning Hannibal’s passage over the
Alps, Montoni contending that he entered Italy by way of Mount Cenis,
and Cavigni, that he passed over Mount St. Bernard. The subject brought
to Emily’s imagination the disasters he had suffered in this bold and
perilous adventure. She saw his vast armies winding among the defiles,
and over the tremendous cliffs of the mountains, which at night were
lighted up by his fires, or by the torches which he caused to be
carried when he pursued his indefatigable march. In the eye of fancy,
she perceived the gleam of arms through the duskiness of night, the
glitter of spears and helmets, and the banners floating dimly on the
twilight; while now and then the blast of a distant trumpet echoed
along the defile, and the signal was answered by a momentary clash of
arms. She looked with horror upon the mountaineers, perched on the
higher cliffs, assailing the troops below with broken fragments of the
mountain; on soldiers and elephants tumbling headlong down the lower
precipices; and, as she listened to the rebounding rocks, that followed
their fall, the terrors of fancy yielded to those of reality, and she
shuddered to behold herself on the dizzy height, whence she had
pictured the descent of others.
Madame Montoni, meantime, as she looked upon Italy, was contemplating
in imagination the splendour of palaces and the grandeur of castles,
such as she believed she was going to be mistress of at Venice and in
the Apennine, and she became, in idea, little less than a princess.
Being no longer under the alarms which had deterred her from giving
entertainments to the beauties of Thoulouse, whom Montoni had mentioned
with more _eclât_ to his own vanity than credit to their discretion, or
regard to truth, she determined to give concerts, though she had
neither ear nor taste for music; _conversazione_, though she had no
talents for conversation; and to outvie, if possible, in the gaieties
of her parties and the magnificence of her liveries, all the noblesse
of Venice. This blissful reverie was somewhat obscured, when she
recollected the Signor, her husband, who, though he was not averse to
the profit which sometimes results from such parties, had always shown
a contempt of the frivolous parade that sometimes attends them; till
she considered that his pride might be gratified by displaying, among
his own friends, in his native city, the wealth which he had neglected
in France; and she courted again the splendid illusions that had
charmed her before.
The travellers, as they descended, gradually, exchanged the region of
winter for the genial warmth and beauty of spring. The sky began to
assume that serene and beautiful tint peculiar to the climate of Italy;
patches of young verdure, fragrant shrubs and flowers looked gaily